Tag Archives: reduce-abandon-rate

It’s that special time of year. Put your hands together and give it up for the 2018 winners of Fonolo’s Customer Experience Excellence Awards!

Each year, Fonolo takes pause and looks at the big CX picture, studying the work of the best and brightest contact centers across all industries and regions. It awards those that shoot for the stars by significantly reducing hold times and thus winning the hearts of clients. We are honored to acknowledge two amazing businesses for their outstanding achievement in improving their customers’ experiences through the offering of call-backs. The recognized companies have optimized their agent experiences, reduced abandon rates, and made award-winning experiences for their customers. We are proud of them.

The call center experience is under great scrutiny from today’s consumers. There are many ways to fall short of their expectations. One surefire way of doing so is to put callers on hold. Tolerance for long wait times has been getting lower and lower. If the wait is longer than a few minutes, callers will complain to your agents (leading to longer handle times) and they will vent on social media (see onholdwith.com). Not good.

On the other hand, call center managers have to be cost-conscious in their approach to staffing. Hold times are often a simple consequence of a limited budget for agents. Luckily, there is a way to lessen the impact of hold times, without hiring agents: Offer your callers a call-back instead.

You can add call-back functionality to your call center through an independent vendor (like Fonolo) or through your existing call center platform, if it is available. Let’s look at the pros and cons of both options. Continue reading →

The objective for this year’s CCW Conference & Expo is to strengthen the contact center’s foundation for future transformation. As innovation in the call center space grows and customer expectations increase, this is a mission Fonolo can get behind. That’s why we’re excited to be exhibiting once again at the 18th Annual Call Center Week Conference & Expo, June 26 – June 30, 2017, at The Mirage in Las Vegas.

The CCW Conference and Expo will empower leaders to test, learn and try the next big thing in customer experience optimization. Here’s your chance to see how Fonolo can help you smooth out spikes in call volume, eliminate hold-time, and reduce abandon rates!

Call centers are under a lot of pressure to deliver on consumer expectations while keeping costs contained. That central challenge was there even before social media, chat, and email showed up to complicate matters. Those alternate channels have taken some pressure off of voice calls, but the flip side of that is that the calls that do end up with an agent require more time and effort. As a result, many companies still have long wait times to speak to an agent. If you don’t have the budget to staff up, another option you should consider is call-backs.

Simply put, replacing hold-time with a call-back is the closest thing to a “magic bullet” that you’ll find in the call center world. Call-backs make callers happier, and agents more efficient!

If you work in a call center, you know what a challenging environment it really is. Managers are constantly being asked to do “more with less”, while facing increasing call volumes. Meanwhile, there’s tremendous pressure on agents to meet and exceed target metrics – in an extremely high-stress environment. These factors often contribute to an understaffed and overworked call center, which results in long hold times, high call abandonment rates, and a poor customer experience.

In an environment like this, it’s hard to make the case to spend additional dollars to improve efficiency or, for that matter, morale. But as a call center employee, you can make a very powerful case to your boss that offering a call-back option (and thus eliminating hold time) can do just that. So here’s how to convince your boss that your call center needs call-backs. Continue reading →

What’s happening when your contact center is experiencing a high number of abandoned calls? Simply put, you’re receiving more incoming calls than your agents can handle, resulting in longer than normal hold times. Maybe it’s just a spike in call volume (even the best centers experience peaks), or not enough agents on the floor; either way the result is upset customers and a negative experience – neither of which you want. Continue reading →

The best way for a call center to stand out from the competition is by providing an excellent customer experience – we all know this, right?

So let me ask you, how long are your customers waiting in queue before their questions are addressed? The fact is: The longer they wait, the more frustrated they’ll become. Most callers will start to rate their satisfaction level with your company almost immediately, even before any interaction with an agent has taken place.

86% of consumers are put on hold every time they contact a business. In fact, the average person spends almost 43 days of their entire life on hold. Not surprisingly, customers say their biggest frustration when phoning a contact center – by a whopping 43% – is being put on hold.

A while ago, we documented how Fonolo helped Tech CU (a credit union based in San Jose) handle unpredictable spikes in call volume to its call center. Like many organizations, they struggled with high abandon rates (upwards of 20%), no matter how they managed their workforce.

By implementing In-Call Rescue (a cloud-based call-back platform), Tech CU was able to replace hold-time with a call back when call volumes – and hold times – peaked. This lowered the rate of call abandonment: Rather than hang-up, members could instead choose the call-back option and receive a call when an agent was free to speak with them, something that also improved the customer experience. Continue reading →

Last week, we had a terrific joint webinar with our friends at Parature. John Seeds (Parature’s Marketing Director) joined me to talk about “4 Trends to Watch in 2014: Multi-Channel Customer Service.” The whole thing is available on demand here. Thanks to everyone who attended!

We had a lively audience that asked some great questions at the end of the presentations. Since we try to keep a quick pace in these events, I kept my answers fairly short. I’m going to use this blog post to elaborate on some of those questions:

How does Visual IVR relate to call-backs?

What are some ways to reduce cost-per-call?

How is Fonolo’s call-back solution different from other offerings on the market?